Thursday, October 28, 2004

Reality-Based Reporting and the Fantasies of Empire-Building

(Courtesy of S.N.A.F.U.)

Ron Suskind's Without a Doubt has been circulating around the web because of mind-blowing revelations like this one:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''


Now Salon has published a new interview with Suskind called Reality-Based Reporting

Ron Suskind, who exposed the ruthless internal operations of Team Bush, tells Salon that many Republicans, too, are frightened by the White House's "kill-or-be-killed desire to undermine public debate based on fact."


Also check out:

Mary Jacoby's The Dunce

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hmm, I would like to read Suskind's account of Hughes departure especially in light of the fact that she has returned. I have never read anything that implied she left under negative circumstances. I talked at some length recently with a woman who worked under Hughes and left after she did (to get married and move to Charlotte). Point is, it was interesting to hear directly an insider's description of the power dynamic at work in the oval office. Evidently Rove and Hughes butt heads over policy. Together, they tempered each other, but, after her departure, Rove had more leeway to direct policy. Then, things turned sour (to generalize grossly). BMAC